A mesmerizing Teyana Taylor stars in A.V. Rockwell’s feature directing debut, about motherhood and survival in a fast-changing city.
The first time you truly see Inez De La Paz, the galvanic center of “A Thousand and One,” she is framed against a wall that’s as red as a fire alarm. Inez is on the move, as she often is in this heart-clencher, the low-angle camera worshipfully pointed up at her. And no wonder: Inez is a dynamo, a force. She’s tough and beautiful, mouthy and unwaveringly loyal, but if she moves fast it’s often because she has no other choice. All she has is forward momentum, her unbending will and the small, somber boy at her side.
Played by a mesmerizing Teyana Taylor, Inez holds you rapt throughout this sweeping New York story of love and survival, motherhood and gentrification. It opens in 1994 and then jumps first to 2001 and later to 2005, a time frame that takes it from the beginning of the zero-tolerance years of the Giuliani mayoralty to the start of the Bloomberg boom times. Along the way, buildings fall and rise, and Inez raises that small boy, Terry (she usually calls him just T), an unsmiling, guarded child who grows into an anxious teenager and then, under Inez’s hawkish watch, continues to grow and thrive, eventually becoming some kind of miracle.
“A Thousand and One” is the feature debut of A.V. Rockwell, and it too can feel like a wonder. It’s a small movie only in the most pedestrian sense: It’s intimate, humanly scaled and concerns ordinary people with ordinary struggles. It doesn’t have stars, just a few familiar faces and names, including Taylor, a musician, as well as the actor Will Catlett, who plays Lucky, Inez’s gruff love interest. But these faces have character, personality, history, as does this vision of New York and its crowded byways and sagging buildings, with their faded grandeur, smeary windows, fragile pipes and impastos of paint lacquering the halls.
What interests Rockwell are the lives in the apartments and how these lives joyfully and chaotically flow back and forth into the streets, pumping energy into the city, enlivening and sustaining it. Rockwell, who also wrote the movie, was born and raised in Queens. (Her parents are from Jamaica.) She knows New York, and she wants you to know (and feel) it, too. She has a documentarian’s sense of place, and while she shows the grime and the mess, she also finds the beauty — and the poignant history — in how the city’s jagged, kaleidoscopic parts restlessly fit together to make a vibrant whole.
The movie opens on a brief, darkly lit scene of Inez styling another’s inmate’s hair in a cell at Rikers Island that is soon followed by shots of her, now liberated, navigating a sun-drenched Brooklyn. Rockwell has a raft of earlier short movies and music videos on her résumé, work that showcases her talent for economically turning faces into stories, moods and feelings into images. In “A Thousand and One,” she packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.
That story clicks in after Inez is released from Rikers and spots Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who’s six and in foster care, hanging out with some friends. It’s an uneasy reunion, and while the details of their past life and separation are sketchy (the characters talk like people, not narrative delivery systems), Inez has soon charmed her way back into Terry’s affections. She buys him a toy (a Power Ranger) and coaxes reluctant smiles from him, but when she learns that he has been injured at the foster home, she abruptly makes the decision that will shape the rest of their lives: Inez snatches Terry, ushering them into a new reality.
After some missteps, they settle into an apartment in Harlem, where she grew up and which becomes an instructive, mirror-like backdrop. Inez secures fake documents for Terry and gives him a new name, allowing them to remain under the radar. She wants do hair; she settles for the steady paycheck of a cleaning job. The work wears her down, but she keeps going. Lucky moves in, they marry and the story shifts to 2001, the year Terry (now played by Aven Courtney) turns 13; after a while, the movie takes another leap and Terry, now 17 (Josiah Cross takes over), is thriving at school and the neighborhood is newly humming.
As time passes, Rockwell plays with genre — the social-issue drama, the maternal melodrama — as well as with color, light and texture, variations that complement, and comment on, the changes happening outside Inez and Terry’s apartment. Rockwell also repeatedly folds in panoramas of the city, using long shots and aerial views to anchor New York (and you) in specific times and places. When she lingers on an image centered by the glowing red sign of the Apollo Theater, she is offering up a glimpse of beauty. She’s also tethering the story and its people to a history, one that’s soon imperiled by new neighbors and jackhammers.
Rockwell is too cleareyed is to be nostalgic for the old, grittier, grimier New York; she’s also too much of a dialectician. There’s no angry chest-thumping about the ravages of capitalism in “A Thousand and One.” Yet in telling the story of Inez and Terry — who make a home with each other and who have both been repeatedly failed by institutional forces — Rockwell is simultaneously chronicling the intersecting life stories of a neighborhood, a city and a world. It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. Yet what happens when power descends, razing that village to the ground and remaking it in its own pitiless image?
A Thousand and One
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.
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